WELCOME to Poetry Matters, the blog of Ireland’s Dedalus Press, bringing you news, interviews, samples and much more.
Two new poems by Ross Thompson, introduced by the poet IN OCTOBER OF 2019, a few months before the world temporarily fell apart, my family took a half-term trip to Edinburgh. Like all vacations, it offered an opportunity to exist
Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin is an Irish-language poet whose Rogha Dánta / Selected Poems entitled Lig don nGiorria Suí / Let the Hare Sit, with English translations by Paddy Bushe, was recently published by Dedalus Press. Here she considers what it
In an occasional series of new poems from around the world in English translation, POETRY MATTERS is pleased to bring you two poems from Syrian poet Shurouk Hammoud. Interview with the remains of a Syrian man What did the war
Poet Mark Roper ventures out along Waterford’s Anne River, hoping for a sighting, or hearing, of the grasshopper warbler A GRASSHOPPER WARBLER is a small, inconspicuous, secretive bird, which likes to spend its time deep inside tangled vegetation, often near
Russian-born Irish-based poet Polina Cosgrave on the poetry affair, or the heady attractions and transformative power of an engagement with poetry POETRY HAPPENS in isolation. It is taken like a drug, when nobody sees. You meet poetry like a lover.
Liu Xun introduces The Crane, Selected Poems of Yau Noi (Dedalus Press, 2022), translated by Liu Xun and Harry Clifton Chinese literature has always been almost too immense to talk about, for myself or for many lecturers working in institutions
Leeanne Quinn and Joseph Woods introduce Romance Options: Love Poems for Today, their life- and love-affirming anthology of new Irish love poems, published by Dedalus Press in 2022 WHEN WE WERE INVITED by Dedalus Press last autumn to take on
In a wide-ranging and thought-provoking ars poetica, poet, editor and festival director Patrick Cotter answers our occasional 7 questions on poetry. Your poems are noted for their marked lack of sentimentality. Is poetry devoid of sentimentality merely a mark of
AN ART OF BRILLIANT FRAGMENTS THOMAS KINSELLA, who died yesterday, 22 December 2021, aged 93, was among the most significant voices in contemporary Irish writing, celebrated as a translator and editor, a political commentator in a way that was almost
Do you remember how or why you started writing poems? The arrival of my poems coincided with a period of change and grief in my early thirties. I was living in London studying Drama and Theatre. The place where I
Do you remember how or why you started writing poems? The very first poems were written in the classroom. They were set tasks. Commissions if you will. The teacher would instruct us to write a poem about an elephant, or
How/when did you start to write? I’ve loved poetry for as long as I remember – Keats was a favourite when I was a teenager. I did a BA in English and French, and relished the immersion in literature in
How/when did you start to write? Did poems precede prose or vice versa? When I was a small child, Dad would invite me to tell a story or sing a song for the family after supper. I would stand by
Circling the Subject: Leeanne Quinn’s second collection of poems, Some Lives, introduced by Aoife Lynch Leeanne Quinn’s second collection, is a rich and generous exploration of how poetry is made and how it makes meaning. Simultaneously intimate and outward-looking, Some
Poetry publishing is, at the best of times, an odd business. But yesterday’s unusual exchange with a customer was of the kind that makes the more difficult parts worthwhile. In the late morning I received a call from what looked like
FOLLOWING is our series of 5 postcards, issued in June 2020 to mark the publication of The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems, and included free with the first 100 copies of the book purchased directly from this
FOLLOWING is a selection of our Isolation PoemCards, chosen from the many submitted via the comments section on the Dedalus Press Facebook page, during March and April 2020. Thanks to all the poets, and the many hundreds of others who
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan, one of the contributors to Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets, considers home, belonging and the writing life I had found an aerial shot of Dublin on Google, laid out like an intricate carpet, glowing under the rise
Poet and translator Keith Payne on a favourite book, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (City Lights Books. The Pocket Poets Series: Number 19) The idea is really simple. Every day on your lunch hour, if a lunch hour you take,
WE WERE DELIGHTED to be directed to an interview with the distinguished Irish poet and poetry teacher James J McAuley, conducted by Phyllis Silver in 1983 for a programme once again available on Spokane Public Radio. Jim, to his
